Why use e-commerce?

Why use e-commerce? The popularity of online shopping has increased dramatically over the past few years. Not only does it provide the convenience of allowing customers to shop in the comfort of their own home, it also allows businesses to trade on a global marketplace, targeting even more potential customers. Because everything is done electronically, e-commerce stores can also help generate recurring revenue, by recommending new products to customers based on previous purchases, and  by keeping them up to date with the store's catalog. Rolling out your own framework Throughout the course of this book, we are going to build a framework of our own, using PHP, as opposed to making use of an existing product. Sometimes, it is more appropriate to use existing solutions; sometimes it is better to use your own solutions. As you are reading this book, hopefully you know why you want to create your own framework. However, let's look at why we are going to create ours. Why PHP? PHP is a very popular language, and because it isn't a framework in its own right, we can easily structure our framework out of it, however we wish. The main choice for a programming language is generally down to your own preference. Most modern web hosts support PHP and MySQL, and while languages like  Ruby on Rails are gaining popularity, at the moment hosting for them is not as common. This book assumes that you already have a reasonable understanding of PHP, so hopefully that will also be an important factor in why you want to use PHP; perhaps you need to develop something quickly, and don't want to use a language or platform that is out of your comfort zone. Why a framework? Instead of looking to create an e-commerce system, designed to perform all types of e-commerce tasks, we will create a framework. This will make it easy to extend the needs of any e-commerce project with minimal effort. Because we are creating our own framework, it is going to be something we will know and understand very  well, meaning that if we do need to extend it or use it, we can do so easily.